At night, though, she longed for her mother. She would call out to her, tell her her troubles and beg for help, whispering; 'Mama, dearest Mama, help me!'
She felt weak and helpless, a different person from the one who calmly told her father: 'There's nothing more to discuss. I'm staying here and that's that.'
62
While they were eating, Nadya said thoughtfully: 'Tolya preferred boiled potatoes to fried.'
'Tomorrow,' said Lyudmila, 'he'll be nineteen years and seven months old.'
That evening she remarked: 'How upset Marusya would have been, if she'd known about the Fascist atrocities at Yasnaya Polyana.'
Soon Alexandra Vladimirovna came in from a meeting at the factory.
'What splendid weather, Vitya!' she said to Viktor as he helped her off with her coat. 'The air's dry and frosty. "Like vodka", as your mother used to say.'
'And if she liked the sauerkraut,' Viktor recalled, 'she used to say, "It's like grapes.'"
Life went on like an iceberg floating through the sea: the underwater part, gliding through the cold and the darkness, supported the upper part, which reflected the waves, breathed, listened to the water splashing…
Young people in families they knew were accepted as research students, completed their dissertations, fell in love, married, but there was always an undertone of sorrow beneath the lively talk and the celebrations.
When Viktor heard that someone he knew had been killed at the front, it was as though some particle of life inside him had died, as though some colour had faded. Amid the hubbub of life, the dead man's voice still made itself heard.
The time Viktor was bound to, spiritually and intellectually, was a terrible one, one that spared neither women nor children. It had already killed two women in his own family – and one young man, a mere boy. Often Viktor thought of two lines of Mandelstam, which he had once heard from Madyarov, a historian who was a relative of Sokolov's:
The wolfhound century leaps at my shoulders, But I am no wolf by blood.
But this time was his own time: he lived in it and would be bound to it even after his death.
Viktor's work was still going badly. His experiments, which he had begun long before the war, failed to yield the predicted results. There was something absurd and discouraging about the chaos of the data and the sheer obstinacy with which they contradicted the theory.
At first Viktor was convinced that the reason for these failures lay in his unsatisfactory working conditions and the lack of new apparatus. He was continually irritated with his laboratory assistants, thinking that they devoted too little energy to their work and were too easily distracted by trivia.
However, his troubles did not really stem from the fact that the bright, charming and talented Savostyanov was constantly scheming to obtain more ration-coupons for vodka; nor from the fact that the omniscient Markov gave lectures during working hours – or else spent his time explaining just what rations this or that Academician received and how this Academician's rations were shared out between his two previous wives and his present wife; nor from Anna Naumovna's habit of recounting all her dealings with her landlady in insufferable detail.
On the contrary – Savostyanov's mind was still clear and lively; Markov still delighted Viktor with his calm logic, the breadth of his knowledge and the artistry with which he set up the most sophisticated experiments: Anna Naumovna lived in a cold, dilapidated, little cubby-hole, but worked with a superhuman conscientiousness and dedication. And of course Viktor was still proud to have Sokolov as a collaborator.
Greater rigour in the execution of the experiments, stricter controls, the recalibration of the instruments – all these failed to introduce any clarity. Chaos had erupted into the study of the organic salts of heavy metals when exposed to fierce radiation.
Sometimes this particle of salt appeared to Viktor in the guise of an obscene, crazy dwarf – a red-faced dwarf with a hat over one ear, twisting and writhing indecently as he made obscene gestures at the stern countenance of the theory. The theory had been elaborated by physicists of international fame, its mathematics were flawless, and decades of experimental data from the most renowned laboratories of England and Germany fitted comfortably into its framework. Shortly before the war, an experiment had been set up in Cambridge with the aim of confirming, in certain extreme conditions, the behaviour of particles predicted by the theory. The success of this experiment was the theory's most brilliant triumph. To Viktor, it seemed as exalted and poetic as the experiment on relativity which confirmed the predicted deviation of a ray of light from a star passing through the sun's gravitational field. Any attack on this theory was quite unthinkable – it would be like a soldier trying to rip the gold braid off a field-marshal's shoulders.
Meanwhile, the dwarf carried on with his obscene foolery. Not long before Lyudmila had set off for Saratov, Viktor had thought that it might be possible to expand the framework of the theory – even though this necessitated two arbitrary hypotheses and considerable further complication of the mathematics.
The new equations related to the branch of mathematics which was Sokolov's particular speciality. Viktor wasn't sure of himself in this area and asked for Sokolov's help. Sokolov managed fairly quickly to extrapolate new equations for the expanded theory.
The matter now seemed settled – the experimental data no longer contradicted the theory. Delighted with this success, Viktor congratulated Sokolov. Sokolov in turn congratulated Viktor – but the anxiety and dissatisfaction still remained.
Viktor's depression soon returned. 'I've noticed, Pyotr Lavren-tyevich,' he said to Sokolov, 'that I get into a bad mood whenever I see Lyudmila darning stockings in the evening. It reminds me of the two of us. What we've done is patch up the theory, and very clumsily at that, using different-coloured wools.'
He worried away at his doubts like someone scratching a scab. Fortunately he was incapable of deceiving himself, knowing instinctively that self-consolation could lead only to defeat.
The expansion of the theory had been quite valueless. Now the theory had been patched up, it had lost its inner harmony; the arbitrary hypotheses deprived it of any independent strength and vitality and the equations had become almost too cumbersome to work with. It had somehow become rigid, anaemic, almost talmudic. It was as though it no longer had any live muscle.
A new series of experiments carried out by the brilliant Markov then contradicted the new equations. To explain this contradiction, he would have to resort to yet another arbitrary hypothesis. Once again he would have to shore up the theory with splinters of wood and old matchsticks.
'It's a botched job,' he said to himself. Viktor knew all too well that he was following the wrong path.
A letter came from the Urals: the factory was busy with orders for military equipment and the work of casting and machining the apparatus ordered by Shtrum would have to be postponed for six to eight weeks.
This letter didn't upset Viktor. He no longer expected the arrival of the new apparatus to change anything. Now and again, however, he would be seized with a furious desire to get his hands on the apparatus as soon as possible – just to convince himself once and for all that the theory was hopelessly and irrevocably contradicted by the new data.
The failure of his work seemed to be linked with his personal sorrows. Everything had become grey and hopeless. For weeks on end he would feel depressed and irritable. At times like these he became uncharacteristically interested in the housekeeping, repeatedly interfering and expressing astonishment at how much Lyudmila spent.